“What kind of question is that?” He set an eave of muffin afloat in his coffee, then captured it on a plastic spoon. “I just told you I was intending to stay on the sidelines.”
“Like an umpire, you mean?”
“Like a guy in the last row of the bleachers. Just watching and hoping for the best. You’re old enough to know what you want.”
“You ought to put that on my tombstone. ‘She’s old enough to know what she wants.’ ”
“All right.”
“Oh, Lord, how did I ever get to be thirty-five?”
“How did I ever get to be sixty-six?”
“You must hate having such an old kid. It’s obscene.”
“Well, I don’t really think so. Not obscene.”
“I wish I were sixty-six. Then I wouldn’t be going through this fake divorce.”
It shamed her to be saying this; she didn’t mean it. Being sixty-six was the worst thing she could think of, and she’d only said it to cheer her father up. She knew it did people good to be envied, even for a minute, and even when they knew it was less than authentic.
“It’s never easy, Fay, these breakups. Believe me, I know. A lot turns on them. A whole life can turn on them, though I honestly don’t believe it often happens that way. Most of our heavy decisions amount to nothing. Momentary thunder and then it’s all over, everything back to normal.”
“So, do you think I’m doing the right thing? I mean, after three years, and here I am, still not sure of this person yet. I just don’t feel too much. Not enough. Not much spark. What a word, spark. Fizz is what I mean.”
“Passion?”
She blinked. The word startled her, coming from her father’s lips. “He’s not a bad person,” she said. “He’s really quite a decent person, as you know. He certainly would never do anything outrageous. He’s even got this wretched saintly side to him. He wouldn’t ruin my life or anything. That really drives me crazy, knowing that it could just possibly be okay to go on with him. But do you think I’m doing the right thing, ending it? Just because the fizz is low. Yes or no? Be honest.”
“Yes.”
And then he put down his cup and said, “If it’s what you really want.”
FAY DIDN’T TELL her father that Peter was moving back in with his ex-wife, Fritzi. She didn’t know herself until Sunday morning, when Peter broke the news. He offered it not in his usual juicy Sheffield tones, but with a truculent chop, as if he wanted to get it over with fast. “I think you should know, Fay, that I’ve arranged to rent a room at Fritzi’s for the next couple of months.” He hurried on. “They’ve got this room on the third floor. Don’t look so stunned, Fay. They can use the cash. Sammy was telling me about the market, it’s been a bit slow this year, and they’ve got their mortgage to meet, and for the time being this room will serve the purpose as well as help them out. I can look for an apartment in September, when a few vacancies will come up. But it’s a perfectly decent room, and there’s a bath … for Christ’s sake, you look stricken, Fay. Be sensible. There’s nothing untoward about it. Fritzi and I’ve been divorced for years, you know that, and she’s happy as a hen with Sammy. Oh, I know you think he’s a bit of a dolt, so do I, but she’s happy. We’re certainly not about to go kinky or anything, if that’s what you’re thinking, and even if we were, what would it matter? That is what you’re thinking, isn’t it? That’s rubbish. It’s even got a separate entrance, the room. Why in hell am I bothering to explain this, will someone please tell me? Anyway, it’s a fait accompli, I’m afraid. I’ve already given them postdated checks for the next four months. And it’s furnished, so I won’t be needing the pine table, that should simplify things for you. I don’t even need a bed. They’ve got one of those fold-out affairs. They were thinking of renting it to a student, but then I ran into Fritzi and Sammy at the Belgian Bakery when I picked up the croissants. You know, sometimes I think you’re dead right about this city, that it really is a bit too small. Okay, I admit it’s a somewhat eccentric arrangement. The whole world doesn’t have to know, and it’s just temporary, it’s practical, we have to be moderately practical until we decide what we want to do with the condo. We can’t afford to be unreasonable. What I mean is, we can’t be foolishly extravagant and overly delicate. This opportunity has, well, presented itself, running into Fritzi and hearing about their spare room. You’re not crying, Fay. Oh, for God’s sake, why on earth would you cry about a thing like this? It doesn’t make sense, it’s ludicrous. Half the time I don’t know what’s going on with you, what’s inside your head.”
FAY LOVES HER WORK at the folklore center.
To begin with, she admires the new building of pale sandstone, the large, accommodating display area, the administrative floor with its soft green carpet and painted doors, each a different color – hers is yellow – and each opening onto a fresh cubicle of polished plaster and a trio of high slit windows like open mouths. Fay’s three windows overlook a sliver of the old warehouse district and a section of disused railroad track and, beyond that, clear to the sky, the curved crust of the Red River, which is really brown, sliding its way northward.
The staff numbers forty, and there is not one among them who refers to her as Miss McLeod or even Ms. McLeod. She is Fay to Hannah Webb, the director, and Fay to Art Frayne, who does electrical work around the place and simple carpentry.
Her office is modest. One wall holds shelves of her books, and the opposite wall is covered with family snapshots – her parents, her two nephews, a blown-up photo of her sister, Bibbi, holding a hammer in her hands, one of Peter at Victoria Beach, and so on – and three large posters, all of them framed, all of them announcing special exhibitions the center has put on in recent years. At angles sit two molded chairs covered with textured blue cotton, and, behind her desk, her own shiny desk chair. The desk itself is wide and handsome, composed of some hard white unscratchable substance; no one liked these desks at first, but now everyone does. Her official title is Associate Folklorist. Sometimes she swivels sideways in her chair and looks over at her books, then her posters, then her tumbling green plants, and finally the glistening desk top, and says to herself, administering a dose of bracing tribute, I am an Associate Folklorist. The word fills her mouth with meaninglessness. She takes a shy secret pleasure in knowing she doesn’t quite fulfill this role, and sometimes, thinking of it, she looks straight up at the ceiling and laughs.
At the center, each day is swallowed by the next, Monday to Friday, over and over; the pattern can be read in its tides of energy. Fay can see, but not feel, the monotony of it. In the morning she attends to the necessary administrative details, the not unpleasant meetings in the board room, then the correspondence, the memos, the conducted tours, which the staff shares, then lunch at the nearby Amigo Café – a bowl of soup and a carrot muffin, or else she brings a bag lunch and eats it at her desk. In the afternoons, at least for the last three years, she does her mermaids. (“I do my mermaids,” she says, in the same way her father, sitting down on weekends to his balsa wood and glue, says, “I’m doing my windmills.”) The mermaid hours pass quickly. Mermaid work means poring over journals and offprints, making notes, following up clues, sending out dozens of letters. Each jotted note, each new file adds to the sum of reality. One idea opens magically to ten or twelve others, and she knows by now that this is going to be a problem, that there’s altogether too much twirl and spread to her inquiry and not enough in the way of tight, helpful boundaries.
Around three o’clock she wanders down to the canteen for coffee. Beverly, Anne, Hannah, Ken, Donna, Colin – her friends, her colleagues – they’ll all be there. The youngishly old Beverly Miles, doyenne of popular-cultural forms and a lover of social gatherings however humble, will be there early and already digging vigorously into her cracked black purse for a paper sachet of rosehip or chamomile, an expectant convivial glow on her broad face that emends the brightness of her gray ponytail swinging and twitching and keeping time with her conversation. Anne Morris
, Ken Merchant, Donna Watts, who heads the volunteer program, and Katherine Hill, secretary to the director, will wander in, talking, talking, talking – snatches of their talk float over the heads of the others – Nicaragua, strip mining, Earth Watch – and Colin King will shortly join them. If Peter is not in the field – off to Regina or Calgary or Ottawa – he may join them, too.
On Mondays everyone tends to be full of pleasant fatigue and minor grievances. By Friday the tenor of canteen talk will be up a dozen degrees. Anne Morris, who is Fay’s age, will be heading up to her cottage in the Lake of the Woods with her husband, Frank, opening it up for the season and urging invitations on the others. There might be talk of a new position coming up, an assistant for Donna Watts, who any day now will be announcing her pregnancy, not that she needs to announce it. The possibility of this new appointment has been discussed on and off for the eight years Fay has worked at the center, and always it seems on the brink of fulfillment. Fay will reveal to the others the latest news from the mermaid world, real news from the Loire delta in France, where two teenage girls claim to have sighted a fishtailed woman, a sirène, rising from a shallow lake at dusk. Colin will snort and discredit, Anne will be analytical, and all the rest will offer up the cool glee and helpful tactics of professional scholars. “I don’t know,” says Hannah Webb, sliding into an empty chair and opening her carton of milk with a scarlet thumbnail. “I wouldn’t discount it entirely.”
Fay knows that before too many days have passed, someone will notice that she and Peter no longer sit at the same table. Anticipating the tactful, consoling questions that inevitably will be put to her, she can already feel the comedy of her tragic role. Single again, our junior folklorist. My, my. Our education outreach man, too. Nothing lasts, it seems.
But these laments lie in the future. As yet, nothing has changed, nothing that anyone would notice. At 5:30 Fay knocks on Peter’s door, or else he knocks at hers, and the two of them go down the back stairway to the parking lot, where their Honda is parked, and then they drive home, turning right on Portage, bucking the worst traffic of the day, turning left onto Osborne, right again onto Stradbrook, as far as the second light.
This, Fay tells herself, glancing in the rearview mirror – nose shiny, hair collapsed (not that it matters if straight hair collapses) – is the only part of the day that will change, and this week is the last lap for them both. Peter intends to move out on Friday evening – he’s announced this firmly – and, in a mood of recklessness, good citizenship, and guilt, she’s offered to help him pack his things.
WHAT DOES IT MEAN to be a romantic in the last decade of the twentieth century? This was the question Fay put to her brother, Clyde.
“To believe anything can happen to us,” he said, and gave her a look.
This conversation took place in the sunroom of the large three-story stucco house in an old residential section of Winnipeg where he lives, quite happily it seems to Fay, with his wife, Sonya, and their two small sons, Gordon and Matthew, who at this moment are asleep upstairs. The air is stuffy and dry because Clyde, an ardent conserver of energy, is reluctant to open a window so early in spring. It is nine o’clock or thereabouts on a dark, blowing April night. Sonya, as usual, is at a meeting. She is a short, spreading, humorous woman, a lawyer for a women’s-rights group. People all over the country know her name, and because she’s often interviewed about abortion on TV, they’ll stop her on the street or in theater lobbies or at dentists’ offices and say, “Don’t I know you?” It scares her, she once told Fay, the sharp way these people examine her features, boldly, frowningly, without the least suggestion of apology, making their calculations and private judgments. Once when she was getting into a car after a public meeting a man threw a rag doll at her. It had been ripped open down the belly so that the stuffing was coming out, and something red and wet, paint, or else ketchup, had been poured over it. Several times she’s received late-night phone calls, a high, driven whine saying, “God will punish you, God will drive a spike up your cunt.” She laughs when she talks about these things; you expect a certain amount of craziness when you work in the abortion area, she says, it’s part of the territory. But the hard, random, assigning eyes of strangers are more than she can deal with. Is she there or not? Real or unreal? It makes her wonder, she says.
Fay’s brother, Clyde, has his own business, McLeod Mindscape, designing computer software. His is an exceedingly specialized line, mathematical and painstaking, to do with knitting machines for women’s hosiery patterns, and he sometimes jokes to friends about being in the erotic end of the electronics business – the world of ankles, knees, thighs, and lace. From infancy he’s suffered from severe stuttering, but in his particular work he has scarcely any need to meet clients face to face, or even to speak to them on the telephone. He’s arranged his business, his whole existence, this way. He works alone out of a cork-walled office in his basement, which means he’s available when Gordon and Matthew come home for lunch and after school.
It’s always the same when Fay sees her younger brother: she has to adjust to that jolting stutter of his, remembering to shift the ordinary rhythms of conversation and reminding herself that though he speaks haltingly, he takes in information at the normal human speed. He is a sociable man who loves speculation of all kinds, courts it in fact, and he has always been exceptionally patient with Fay’s involutions.
Tonight, though, it took him a full minute to respond to her question about the contemporary romantic rubric, then another minute to gather the syllables on his tongue – “To believe anything can happen to us.” (B’s are especially hard for him, also p’s.) His consonants flop and spit, and then teeter maddeningly – almost, but not quite, locked to the roof of his mouth.
Fay sometimes tries to imagine the interior of her brother’s head, and what she sees is pink crosshatching and vacuum tubes and erratically flashing lights. Stuttering, she knows, is considered a crippling affliction, yet Clyde is far from crippled. That stutter of his has saved him from critical severity, which is the wound she assigns herself. She’s wondered (flinching at her own indecent curiosity) how blocked are his cries of rapture or his expressions of love, or whether he and Sonya have worked out some sort of declarative gesture that serves in place of words. His happiness seems double-distilled: at thirty-three he has achieved a kind of plant life down there in his basement, but he comes up the tiled stairs to full-blown domesticity. An urban fastness: house, garden, garage, everything wired tight and warm. Fay knows he worries about her, his big sister, that she’s missing out on something essential which he lacks the arrogance to define.
To be a romantic is to believe anything can happen to us, he said, and later Fay considered how, in his metonymic way, he had summed it up exactly right, although she notices he has set himself carefully outside its gravitational force, and also ignores or rejects the retractable malice romance holds out. Romance, Fay knows, grabs on to people like a prize deformity; it keeps them on edge, taunts them, then slitheringly changes shape and withdraws. Romance – that holy thing. A cycle of rupture and reconciliation. Recently she has begun to understand it for the teasing malady it is.
FAY AND PETER worked hard all evening. She folded and packed his shirts and sweaters, and then his bunched-up socks and underwear. One summer when she was a student, she worked at a suburban shopping center in a place called Jean Junction, and there she was taught the art of precision folding. It still, after all this time, gave her pleasure to transform a jumble of clothes into neat rectangular packets, as flat, trim, and uniform as fast-food hamburger patties.
While she busied herself folding and stacking, Peter wrapped coffee mugs and plates in newspaper and lowered them into cardboard cartons. The kitchen radio was tuned to a soft-rock station, old-fashioned rock, and when the Beatles came on with “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” the two of them sang along as if they were any happy couple preparing to move to a new location.
Later they went for a walk in the neighborhood.
The night had turned cold, with a strong steady breeze that kept at them, and a moon that stared down hard and glassy. They walked southward first, down a street quaintly named Gertrude, and then up a parallel street called Jessie. Many of the streets in this part of the city were similarly named: Minnie, Agnes, Flora, Bella, and Lizzie, immortalizing, Fay has always supposed, the patient or demanding wives of early-twentieth-century developers, women who would feel proud to walk down streets that bore their names, or else ashamed and self-conscious, but in any case assured of their thread of connection to a place where they had, however accidentally, found themselves.
Fay is able to see more beauty in these small front yards than she used to, and this has made her feel hopeful about the future. Each yard is fenced with varied, incongruous materials, so that wire netting meets with wooden pickets, and woven metal strips with peeled poles. One house, on the corner of Adelaide and Edna, is surrounded with an odd, low mesh of plastic tubes in astringent shades of orange and yellow, an effect that is oddly cheering. The purpose of these fences must be territorial, Fay thinks, since they are far too flimsy to keep dogs in or out, and offer no protection at all to children, who can easily step over them. Two miles away on Ash Avenue, where she grew up, the front yards flow uninterruptedly in broad even waves down toward the rolled curbs, not even a sidewalk breaking the illusion of easeful neighborly trust, while here on Jessie, street sovereignty remains on guard, and sidewalks run down both sides, the cement broken by a combination of harsh winters and sprawling tree roots. Tonight, walking slowly along one of these old buckled sidewalks and turning a corner, Peter and Fay came across the chalked markings of a hopscotch game.
In the dim street light, the pattern was barely discernable. Fay supposed that the children who had made these scratchings must now be asleep in their beds.